Monday, March 26, 2012

Following a troubling discussion about human trafficking I spent a good part of the next day thinking about this abhorant practice, imagining myself in the shoes of a woman caught up in this trade. This piece is the result.

Girl to 5-F, detail

There are ways out and people who are working to combat the practice but it feels like a drop in the bucket... so alien to the culture in which I live. I thank God for my life and beg for mercy for those who are mired in it. Read here about organizations which strive to combat human trafficking.

The collage papers used in "Girl to 5-F" are representative: decay, filth, sin, loss, oppression, desire, need, hopelessness... hidden underneath a beautiful facade. There are floor numbers, windows and doors, a man on the phone, a woman climbing the stairs... hidden and implied meaning.

Thursday, March 15, 2012

It's interesting to see where my "Piecings" and "Slices" series are taking me. I think it's actually one series. There's no direct painting on this piece; it's made up of slices of other paintings that weren't worthy in themselves but as an assembly of parts the whole has become quite strong.

I find myself struggling with establishing a process for these pieces, mostly having to do with mounting. I've been working mostly on 140# watercolor paper as a substrate which starts to buckle as layers are joined, and then wrestling with the completed work to attach it to a firm support... so I'm finding ways to reduce the buckling in the beginning. Using a stronger support is one way to keep the work flat, adhering the base paper to mat board or acid free foamcore or even wood panels. I think there'll be fewer struggles if I start with a firm substrate, glue the base papers to that and then continue to layer whatever papers I need for the collage. I could start with 300# paper or illustration board or heavy Yupo, all of which hold their shape well.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

For this collage I used mostly my own handpainted papers. The paper with the numbers was discarded on the road outside our beach retreat a few years ago when our family went to Hawaii to celebrate a significant anniversary. It's such a useful bit of paper that I think I'll repeat the idea using number stencils and significant number combinations such as house numbers, birthdates, anniversaries. I think it's important to mine ones' own life for symbolism to use in ones' art... a post for another day.

Thursday, March 01, 2012

﻿I'm still working on the "Piecings" series (need a better name!). I started doodling in the margins of Sunday morning sermon note paper, drawing skinny rectangles and imaging them as slivers of landscape as seen through narrow windows or the arrow slots in medieval castle battlements, with the view divided into sky, forests or crops, and the land below.

detail

I continued drawing these compositions, eventually thinking of them as collages, pieced together from paper and maybe even fabric.

This is the first Sliver. I have another sliver on my easel and am chomping at the bit to get back to work.

Art Tip: Removing acrylic from hands

Use ordinary hand sanitizer to quickly remove acrylic paint and medium from your hands. The alcohol in the sanitizer dissolves the acrylic. Wipe well with a paper towel and then wash with soap and water.

Art Tip: brush cleaning

As I work with acrylic medium for glue or with acrylic paints I stand my brushes in a bucket of water on my work table and give them a soap and water cleanup every day or so. But eventually my brushes get gunky and sometimes I forget to clean them. That's when I clean them with Murphy's Oil Soap. I keep an inch of MOS mixed 1:1 with water in a tall plastic tub (Feta from Costco) and put caked brushes in that solution overnight. By the next day the soap has softened the brush and with a bit of elbow grease I can get the brushes back to useable. This also works for brushes used with oil paint. I gave up using oils but wanted to save those good brushes and Murphy's Oil Soap came to the rescue. Get it at the grocery store.